Taking Over

Two weeks ago I devoted part of my column in SF Weekly to discussing why the theatre doesn't produce right-wing plays these days.

Last night at Berkeley Rep, I think I witnessed my very first full-on right-wing -- in the sense of deeply reactionary -- play in a long, long time. Danny Hoch's Taking Over, a solo show about the problems created by the gentrification of urban neighborhoods, is ardently opposed to change. It's a play about keeping communities as they are and locking outsiders out.

I'm feeling very conflicted about the experience of seeing it.

On the one hand, I'm excited to be in the theatre and be shaken up like that. Instead of being fed opinions that I believe in, Hoch presents a view that challenges many of my own beliefs about what constitutes a community and the price of gentrification. How refreshing to come away from a night at the theatre and be forced to reexamine my own situation as someone who moved to Oakland from San Francisco -- so closely.

On the other, I feel that his view of the world is over-simplistic. What's wrong with wanting a safe neighborhood? It's natural to want to feel safe. Why are all the outsider/interloper/tourist characters in Hoch's play painted in a such a negative light? This makes the show very one-sided, even though Hoch plays many different characters during the course of an hour and a half which creates the illusion that he's taking a 360-degree view on his topic. And why present us over and over again with the same banal images of gentrification -- the lattes, the organic muffins, the baby stores selling $700 strollers -- and then fail to move beyond that and suggest potential solutions to what he sees as the problem of changing communities?

With its controversial message, Taking Over could potentially cause audiences to rethink their feelings about gentrification and even cause some people to "stay home" rather than insist on colonizing places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn (the community in which the play is set) and Oakland. Yet the production ends up ranting at us, so its effect is severely diminished. I guess I'm still waiting for a right-wing play that's engaging enough to turn tides.